With the wide variety of prepared foods available on today's market, there is a need in the food vending and serving art to provide containers for prepared foods which may be properly utilized for holding and shipping prepared foods to the point of sale, and thereafter utilized as an ovenable container for heating that food, in such as microwave ovens, for ultimate consumption.
Such containers are usually made in the form of deep dishes or pans having sidewalls extending upward from a bottom portion and having an out-turned peripheral or annular flange completely surrounding the upper edge of the sidewalls on such a container. These containers may vary in shape from square to round to rectangular as the case may be.
A universally acceptable type lid for this type of container would have the advantages of self-venting, ease of imprinting logos and content information, be so shaped and so proportioned as to make stacking of lidded containers facile and feasible and readily adapted for manual or automatic attachment to the container on which the lid is to be placed. However, in the prior art, there is no method of effectively closing or sealing a lid to a flanged container without the use of automatic or semi-automatic sealing equipment.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a new and novel combined container and lid structure for periphally flanged food containers and the like.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a new and novel lid structure for periphally flanged food containers and the like which provides a means for manually securing the lid to the flanged food container without the need for utilization of automatic or semi-automatic sealing equipment.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a new and novel lid structure for periphally flanged food containers and the like which is of a self-venting configuration.
These and other objects of the present invention will become more fully apparent with reference to the following specification and drawings which relate to the preferred embodiments of the present invention.